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"Itanium was a bit like Brexit. Sold as being a perfect solution before reality emerges and bites it in the ass"

I'm going to disagree with this analogy because:

a) it doesn't fit the reality of Itanium (artifical market segmentation leading to failure)

b) we have enough Brexit commentary without labelling everything that fails as "like Brexit"...

For point (a), Itanium was meant as the 64-bit product line to match SPARC and POWER. MIPS was effectively dead and DEC/HP were merging and in the process killing of PA/RISC and Alpha development, throwing there lot in behind Itanium. Intel wanted to keep seperate 32-bit and 64-bit product lines because of the premium 64-bit commanded.

Unfortunately, when Merced performance sucked, forcing a lot of DEC/HP customers to look elsewhere for their upgrades. Including Linux on x86 for smaller systems.

Then came Itanium 2 which wasn't terrible at the time, but promised compatibility via emulation that the clock speeds/architecture just couldn't support at acceptable performance levels. And then AMD gave us 64-bit support at x86 prices and the increasing RAM capacities meant that the writing was on the wall for any of the competing midrange 64-bit processors. By the time Microsoft were pushing 64-bit with Windows 7/Server 2008, legacy systems were the only thing keeping Itanium going.

If you want a political comparison to Itanium, I'd go with the Scottish independence referendum where Scotland rejected independence in order to remain in the EU (well...amongst other things) only for Brexit to happen.